5 ms·

In my time with a MUD, my absolute favorite parts were: 1. Social interaction 2. Automation! Maybe not all MUDs allowed it, but the one I played was absolute

In my time with a MUD, my absolute favorite parts were: 1. Social interaction 2. Automation! Maybe not all MUDs allowed it, but the one I played was absolutely fine with you using specialized clients such as tintin++ and writing scripts. I started with smaller scripts to automate movement between zones and managing inventory, and I moved on to full bots in there that would take "spoken" commands from trusted players. From what I hear, that'll get you banned in most MMORPGs these days, which is a shame.

markus_zhang 6y ago
Thank you. This is very interesting. I know some MMORPG provides you plugins for automation but many new games don't give you solutions for scripting. I'm wondering if there is any MMORPG that actually gives some serious scripting to players for building their own worlds and sharing with others. It's going to be a hell lot of job to balance out but could be really fun.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  In older text-based gaming: MUCKs tended to be more oriented towards creation and social interaction than MUDs. Many MUCKs would allow players to create their own areas, with a limited degree of scriptability. In modern gaming: Second Life, VRChat, Roblox, et al.
  - markus_zhang 6y ago
    thanks, those are interesting games. I'll check out the MUCKs and see how they balance things (or maybe they just didn't care). The game Neverwinter Nights(2001) introduced a powerful editor so that players can create their own world and join servers. But those servers have to be separated because of different scripts. It would be really fascinating if somehow we can have a connection center (thinking the Sigil city in Planescape) and players can join different "worlds" which maybe have completely different sets of rules (but have the same meta rules to make the connection possible).
    - duskwuff 6y ago
      MUCKs tend to be primarily social; any "game mechanics", beyond absolute core functionality like movement and communication, exist only by consent of the players. Game balance isn't really a concern. Second Life and VRChat roughly follow this model as well. Roblox worlds are more isolated, kind of along the lines of what you're describing for NWN.
markus_zhang 6y ago
I also thought about some MMORPG that have events, but no real quests. You can figure out whatever quests you want in an event. Events could even be triggered by players. You setup the rules (by powerful scripting) and wait for players to trigger them. For example, maybe some player discovered a summoning book, read a page, and somehow opened a maw to another plane and attracted an endless stream of demons. This is a player-triggered event and other players can do whatever they want. They can ally with the demons, they can fight them and craft items from their remainings. The game designer just make sure that every event doesn't break the whole game. Maybe I went too far there with my imagination, lol.
ianbicking 6y ago
It would be cool to use automation to turn yourself into an NPC. I almost wonder if you could train an RNN or something on player action and have it start to clone behavior...
myko 6y ago
The game I played (NCMUD) allowed this and it had a lot to do with me becoming a programmer (MUDs in general did really). At one point I wrote something to generate zones somewhat randomly using the editor the game had built-in - it would transition from "zones" of a particular type (forest/water/desert) and take a few random strings to create (hopefully) reasonable descriptions of a place that could exist. Not the most interesting zone but it allowed me to create blank canvasses to put more interesting elements into. All done with ZuggScript
PebblesRox 6y ago
There are some fun stories by u/Patches765 on reddit about MUD scripting. I especially like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/patches765/comments/5euzt2/intelligent_gaming_trekmush/ https://www.reddit.com/r/patches765/comments/5euzt2/intellig... And if you scroll past the D&D links here, he's got a whole series of stories from his time on the Shadowdale MUD though I forget if they involve any scripting. https://www.reddit.com/r/patches765/comments/5isji2/intelligent_gaming_index/ https://www.reddit.com/r/patches765/comments/5isji2/intellig...
- markus_zhang 6y ago
  > There was several courses I had to complete to "graduate". Each of these were run by a real player who took their job WAY too seriously. I found this kind of things very fascinating. Isn't immersion the ultimate goal of MMO games? Don't the designers want to create a full virtual world so that people can join and forget about real life for a couple of hours? In that perspective, maybe having terrefic graphics actually hurts the real objective. I'm not saying we should go back to MUD, but I'm saying that MMO development teams should invest more in world building. Thank you for introducing such a great poster to me. This guy is a gold mine.

markus_zhang 6y ago

Thank you. This is very interesting. I know some MMORPG provides you plugins for automation but many new games don't give you solutions for scripting. I'm wondering if there is any MMORPG that actually gives some serious scripting to players for building their own worlds and sharing with others. It's going to be a hell lot of job to balance out but could be really fun.

duskwuff 6y ago
In older text-based gaming: MUCKs tended to be more oriented towards creation and social interaction than MUDs. Many MUCKs would allow players to create their own areas, with a limited degree of scriptability. In modern gaming: Second Life, VRChat, Roblox, et al.
- markus_zhang 6y ago
  thanks, those are interesting games. I'll check out the MUCKs and see how they balance things (or maybe they just didn't care). The game Neverwinter Nights(2001) introduced a powerful editor so that players can create their own world and join servers. But those servers have to be separated because of different scripts. It would be really fascinating if somehow we can have a connection center (thinking the Sigil city in Planescape) and players can join different "worlds" which maybe have completely different sets of rules (but have the same meta rules to make the connection possible).
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    MUCKs tend to be primarily social; any "game mechanics", beyond absolute core functionality like movement and communication, exist only by consent of the players. Game balance isn't really a concern. Second Life and VRChat roughly follow this model as well. Roblox worlds are more isolated, kind of along the lines of what you're describing for NWN.

markus_zhang 6y ago

I also thought about some MMORPG that have events, but no real quests. You can figure out whatever quests you want in an event. Events could even be triggered by players. You setup the rules (by powerful scripting) and wait for players to trigger them. For example, maybe some player discovered a summoning book, read a page, and somehow opened a maw to another plane and attracted an endless stream of demons. This is a player-triggered event and other players can do whatever they want. They can ally with the demons, they can fight them and craft items from their remainings. The game designer just make sure that every event doesn't break the whole game. Maybe I went too far there with my imagination, lol.

ianbicking 6y ago

It would be cool to use automation to turn yourself into an NPC. I almost wonder if you could train an RNN or something on player action and have it start to clone behavior...

myko 6y ago

The game I played (NCMUD) allowed this and it had a lot to do with me becoming a programmer (MUDs in general did really). At one point I wrote something to generate zones somewhat randomly using the editor the game had built-in - it would transition from "zones" of a particular type (forest/water/desert) and take a few random strings to create (hopefully) reasonable descriptions of a place that could exist. Not the most interesting zone but it allowed me to create blank canvasses to put more interesting elements into. All done with ZuggScript

PebblesRox 6y ago

There are some fun stories by u/Patches765 on reddit about MUD scripting. I especially like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/patches765/comments/5euzt2/intelligent_gaming_trekmush/ https://www.reddit.com/r/patches765/comments/5euzt2/intellig... And if you scroll past the D&D links here, he's got a whole series of stories from his time on the Shadowdale MUD though I forget if they involve any scripting. https://www.reddit.com/r/patches765/comments/5isji2/intelligent_gaming_index/ https://www.reddit.com/r/patches765/comments/5isji2/intellig...

markus_zhang 6y ago
> There was several courses I had to complete to "graduate". Each of these were run by a real player who took their job WAY too seriously. I found this kind of things very fascinating. Isn't immersion the ultimate goal of MMO games? Don't the designers want to create a full virtual world so that people can join and forget about real life for a couple of hours? In that perspective, maybe having terrefic graphics actually hurts the real objective. I'm not saying we should go back to MUD, but I'm saying that MMO development teams should invest more in world building. Thank you for introducing such a great poster to me. This guy is a gold mine.